Minnesota Transportation Chief Is Out

Friday

Feb 29, 2008 at 4:42 AM

Carol Molnau was removed from her post after years of concern about the transportation department’s performance and last summer’s deadly collapse of a highway bridge.

Minnesota’s transportation commissioner was removed from her post on Thursday by the State Senate after several years of concern about the department’s performance, the low point of which was last summer’s deadly collapse of a highway bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis and its aftermath.

The commissioner, Carol Molnau was nominated to head the state Department of Transportation five years ago in a cost-saving measure by Tim Pawlenty, a Republican who was then the governor-elect. Mr. Pawlenty said the appointment of Ms. Molnau, who was the lieutenant governor-elect, would save the state $108,000 a year.

Ms. Molnau, who served five terms in the State House of Representatives, during which she was chairwoman of the Transportation Finance Committee, will remain lieutenant governor.

Mr. Pawlenty said Ms. Molnau’s chief assistant, Bob McFarlin, would serve as acting commissioner until a permanent successor is nominated and confirmed by the State Senate.

The governor called Thursday’s 44-to-22 vote, which fell nearly along party lines, a disappointing partisan move.

In Ms. Molnau’s tenure, he said, the department “completed more road and bridge projects than in any other comparable period in the state’s history.”

For months, though, some Democratic legislators have criticized Ms. Molnau, 58, for what they called slow and ineffective leadership, a lack of relevant experience and mismanagement.

After the collapse of the Interstate 35W Bridge, which plunged 65 feet into the river on Aug. 1, killing 13 people, inspection reports showed that it had been deemed structurally deficient in 1990 but was not due to be replaced until 2020. Ms. Molnau was strongly criticized because the department had not dealt with the structural problems, which investigators determined months later had resulted from flaws in its design in the 1960s.

Asked at a news conference in August if she intended to resign. Ms. Molnau said, “I have not offered my resignation, nor do I think I’m going to do that.”

But some lawmakers who voted not to reconfirm her said their decision had taken into account Ms. Molnau’s entire tenure, not just issues involving the bridge collapse.

“Even township officers and people who live in my district in southeast Minnesota, which is two hours removed from the capital, have been feeling the impact of her leadership,” said State Senator Sharon L. Erickson Ropes of Winona, Minn. “MinnDot projects are plagued with delays and there’s all sorts of organizational mismanagement that people are upset about at the local level.

“I think it was an appropriate decision simply based on the fact that she hasn’t had a good track record as a financial and organizational manager,” Ms. Ropes said.

Some of Ms. Molnau’s supporters said she had received an unreasonable amount of scrutiny because of her ties to Mr. Pawlenty and his contentious relationship with the state’s elected Democrats.

“It’s certainly a pent-up political issue that festered to this point,” said the Senate minority leader, David H. Senjem, of Rochester and Dodge County. “I think she’s been unfairly blamed for a lot of things. This commissioner has performed as well as any other commissioner.”

Mr. Senjem said that because of her experience in the House, Ms. Molnau had been regarded as an expert on transportation issues. In a statement she released in St. Paul, Ms. Molnau said that her tenure had been “one of the best experiences of my life.” She also said that she was “proud of the agency’s accomplishments in increasing infrastructure investment, improving efficiency and advancing innovation.”

The State Senate confirmed Ms. Molnau as transportation commissioner in 2003, and was due for a reconfirmation vote in January 2007. Since then, however, she had been serving as an unconfirmed commissioner because the Senate did not take action on the matter until this week.

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